Measuring 23-inches, the LCD monitor is ideal for PC gamers though will also be compatible with 3D broadcasts, which we'll see a lot more of in 2010. You won't need to keep the shutter glasses to hand 24/7 thankfully, as the ability to switch between 2D and 3D is of course included. This may be the first 3D product LG's put to market worldwide, but back in July their 47LH50 went on sale in Korea, despite Korea only recently announcing a terrestrial 3D broadcast trial. [Akihabara News]

All three computers in the package will be preloaded with Windows 7, the full contents of which include:

* Space-saving HP Slimline desktop (s5212y)
* Thin-profile 18.5" LCD monitor (w1858)
* Media-savvy HP laptop (G60-535DX)
* Compact HP Mini netbook (110-1125NR)
* Speedy NETGEAR Wireless-G router (WGR614)
* Seamless in-home setup of the PCs and router by Geek Squad (4000954811)

The desktop features a dual-core 2.5GHz Pentium, 3GB memory, 320GB hard drive and double-layer DVD burner, while the laptop is your standard-fare 15.6-inch HP (320GB HDD, 3GB memory, HDMI-out). The netbook is the HP Mini 110, one of our favorite netbooks. Individually, none of these are really thrilling items, but selling them together for $1200 is a ridiculously great deal. That package would run you over $2000 normally, so if your entire household is in need of an upgrade, this looks like a real winner—certainly one of the best ways to save money with Windows 7 promotions. [Best Buy]

Fast Company says that the heart app can shoot your heart rate over social networks, meaning that people can try and send you photos (imagine your favorite gross-out surprise picture) to try to get your heartrate up. The winner would be the one who could make your heart jump the most.

You could also imagine other apps like keeping track of yourself when watching movies, playing games, or engaging in otherwise pleasurable activities and graphing how your day looks. You'd assume that a followup device would be able to measure your breathing rate as well as your heart rate too. [Fast Company]

It kind of sux that even a monitoring app got banned. But, according to Apple:

…this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store.

So no torrent apps, at all, period. Right then.

Instructions on how to install µMonitor on a Jailbroken iPhone can be found here: [µMonitor via TorrentFreak]

I was wondering why anyone would like to see all my porn mirrored at the other side of my desk, but according to the manufacturer, it's ideal for doctor offices, realtors, and that kind of weird people

You've also got dual HDMI ports, four USB ports and what has to be the most straightforward design of anything Alienware's every shipped, which is in and of itself an accomplishment.

They're also selling what appears to be an Alienware-branded version of SteelSeries' nearly 2-year-old 5HV2 headset that they're calling TactX.

And really, we're still using X for Xtreme? Mountain Dew is gross guys.

ALIENWARE PUTS YOU IN THE GAME WITH THE LAUNCH OF THE ALIENWARE OPTX™AW2210 21.5" FULL HD MONITOR AND ALIENWARE TACTX™ HEADSET

· Eye-catching Alienware OptX Monitor boasts 1080p HD, ultra-fast response time and features low-input lag
· New Alienware TactX Headphones single out in-game sounds for a truly immersive experience
· Together, the Alienware OptX AW2210 Monitor and Alienware TactX Headset help to create the ultimate gaming experience

MIAMI – June 30, 2009 –Gamers looking for a completely immersive gaming experience can now arm themselves with two new weapons from Alienware – the 21.5-inch Alienware OptX™ AW2210 Full HD Monitor and the Alienware TactX™ Headset offering a unique custom-engineered audio experience.

The Alienware OptX AW2210 Monitor, which goes on sale today for $299, features a Full HD screen resolution ideal for the latest-generation games and high-definition movies in glorious 1080p. To give gamers that extra edge, the monitor features low-input lag and a 2ms response time for a more real time gaming experience. With sleek looks and a dramatic profile that catch every eye in the room, the display's key features include:

• 21.5-inch Widescreen Flat Panel LCD
• 1920 x 1080 Full HD Resolution
• Ultra-Fast 2ms Response Time
• Low Input-Lag for Intense Gaming
• 16.7 Million Colors for Vibrant Images
• 80,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio
• Tilt, Swivel and Height Adjustable Stand
• 2 x HDMI ports allow for you to plug in to your PC or your TV for either PC or console gaming sessions
• 4 x Universal Serial Bus ports for hassle free connection to flash drives, mouse, keyboard and other peripherals

Serious gamers know that every single component of their set-up is part of creating the best gaming experience possible. The same is true when it comes to their peripherals. Alienware TactX headphones are optimized to single out key in-game sounds, enabling you to detect gunfire, footsteps, reloads and more with precision clarity. The headset also features:

• Convenient Retractable Microphone for Headphone-Only Use
• Custom Audio Environment for Optimized In-Game Sounds
• Closed Circumaural Ear Cups for Long Term Comfort
• Gold-Plated Connectors for Increased Fidelity
• 3-Piece Design for Quick Break-Down and Easy Transport

"The ultimate gaming experience requires more than just a great PC," explained Frank Azor, Dell Gaming. "Alienware is building an ecosystem around our machines to give gamers the complete gaming experience. We're proud to offer peripherals like these that can make all the difference."

The Premium Panel Guarantee
Alienware monitors are designed and built to our highest standards, providing the quality and reliability you expect when you see the Alienware logo. Each has been exhaustively tested and comes backed by a Dell Limited Warranty1. Unyielding commitment to quality and the satisfaction of our customers has driven Dell to offer a Premium Panel Guarantee ensuring replacement of Alienware OptX series monitors with zero bright pixels. Even if only one bright pixel is found, a free panel exchange is guaranteed during the limited warranty period, so customers can rest assured their investment is protected.

[Alienware, Alienware]

I'll CC You in the FL
With LCDs, it's all about the backlighting. This defines contrast, brightness and other performance metrics. When you watch plasma TVs, OLED TVs or even old tube TVs, there's light emanating from each pixel like it was a teeny tiny bulb. Not so with LCD—when you watch traditional LCD TV, you're basically staring at one big lightbulb with a gel screen in front of it.

The typical old-school LCD backlighting tech is CCFL—a cold cathode fluorescent lamp—which is an array of the same kind of lights that make people's lives miserable in offices around the world. The reason they aren't the greatest as backlights for TV watching is that they light up the whole damn display. Because LCD is just a massive screen of tiny doors that open and close, light inevitably leaks through the closed doors, when they're trying to show black, resulting in more of a glowy charcoal. Check out this shot from Home Theater mag to see what I mean:

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LEDs (light emitting diodes) are different from say, an old school incandescent bulb, which heats up a filament to generate light, in that they're electroluminescent—electricity passes through a semiconductor and the movement of the electrons just lights it up. Instead of having one lightbulb in the bottom of the screen, shining up through all of the LCD pixels, you can have arrays of LEDs that shine through smaller portions of the LCD screen, leaving other portions in the dark, so to speak.

OLED—"organic light emitting diode"—is slightly different. Since the electroluminescent component is organic and not a chip, each point of light can be much tinier. That's why an LED TV still needs the LCD screen in front: there's no way to have a single LED per pixel unless the screen is huge, and mounted to the side of a building in Times Square. OLEDs don't: HD OLED displays are made up of red, green and blue dots, no LCD panel required.

LED Is As LED Does
So, Samsung's term "LED TV" is more accurately—and more commonly—described as an LED-backlit LCD. But not all LED displays are created equal.

There are two major kinds of LED backlighting: Edge-lit and local dimming. Edge-lit displays are what they sound like—the LEDs are arranged in strips running along all four edges of the TV, like you can see in this gut shot from Cnet. A light guide directs the glowyness toward the center of the screen. The advantage of edge-lit displays is that they can get incredibly thin, are 40 percent more power-efficient than regular LCDs and are a bit cheaper than local-dimming TVs. But because they're still shooting light indiscriminately across the LCD panel, they can't pull off the black levels that a local dimming backlight setup can.

LED backlighting of the local dimming variety is how you build the best LCD TV in the world. It's called local dimming, as you probably guessed, because there are a bunch of LED bulbs—hundreds in the Sony XBR8—arranged in a grid behind the screen. They can all be dark or brightly lit, or they can turn off individually or in clusters, making for the actual Dark Knight, rather than the Grayish Knight you'd see on many cheaper CCFL LCDs. Sets with local dimming are pricier than edge-lit—the Samsung's local-dimming 46-incher started at $3,500, versus $2800 for one of their edge-lit models. They are thicker too.

What Color Is Your LED?
The color of the LEDs matters too, separating the best LED-backlit LCDs from the the merely great. Most LED sets just use white bulbs. The reason Sony's XBR8 started out at $5,000—as much as Pioneer's king-of-TVs Kuro—is because it uses tri-color LEDs in an RGB array. In each cluster, there are two green bulbs next to one red and one blue (greens aren't as bright). The result is high contrast plus super clean, incredibly accurate color.

LED displays are getting cheaper, more quickly than originally expected, so we could see them go mainstream sooner. You already see the lower-end edge-lit LED tech used in mainstream stuff—MacBook Pro and Dell's Mini 9 to name a couple. Which is a good thing, since the prophesied ascendancy of OLED in 2009 completely failed to happen. So we'll have to make do with LED in the meantime. Just be sure to find out what kind when you're buying.

First off, it depends on which Enterprise you're talking about. The original Enterprise of the '60s, which I've been watching Season 1 of on Blu-ray (quite a good restoration, btw), had what seemed like a tiny ass screen when compared to the IMAX-like experience of the new movie Enterprise. But it's not actually that small.

Using the combined knowledge of the Star Fleet Technical Manual and some screenshots of the episodes, I was able to determine that the screen is a 136-inch display with a 1.73:1 aspect ratio. That's actually smaller than the retina-searing 150-inch Panasonic plasma that we played with before. Yes, Adam Frucci and various captains of industry that have way too much money have viewed things in their own home on a larger display than a captain of a STARSHIP.

But Picard isn't going to be showed up by 21st century technology. His glorious Enterprise D has a 212-inch screen with a 1.92:1 aspect ratio, which is big enough for Riker to jam chairs through while Picard's off in a fantasy land with Whoopi Goldberg. Nice job, Riker.

Not only is this screen gigantic, it supposedly displays stuff in three-dimensions, shifting views or something so Jean-Luc can put a face to Troi's feelings of "he's hiding something". The Star Trek Wiki explains thusly:

While it is a subtle effect, the viewscreen seen throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation clearly displayed 3-D images. This effect was created in some scenes by providing multiple angles on the viewer, with the image on screen displayed at a corresponding angle, rather than a flat, single angle shot.

But what about the newest technology? What have we learned from years of actual consumer electronics development that the tech-consultants on the movie set could incorporate into the latest iteration of the Enterprise? "Bigger is better."

The display on new-Kirk's ship looks massive, but only because it's so wide. If you're measuring the screen diagonally in display-talk, it's around 326-inches, which is larger in absolute terms than even Picard's screen. It also has a 3.25:1 display ratio, making it wider than most film ratios. But if you're talking pure width, it measures about 26 feet across. Quite impressive.

If they ever do remake TNG, I suspect that the viewscreen will wrap entirely around the side of the bridge all the way to the back where neo-Worf and neo-Geordi will be able to see what's going on behind the Enterprise. It's easier to turn your head to see a display than to tell someone to press a button to change the view.

So yes, this is our dream for when we go into space. Not only will we be able to be in space, we'll have really, really big screens to watch stuff on.

ViBook supports up to a 23-inch monitor at 1680x1050 or 1600x1200 resolution. Like the ViDock, it renders graphics on the device itself, offloading the processing from your on-board graphics card. This is good, because it allows you to attach four (for Macs) or six (for PCs) more monitors to your setup. But it's also bad because it relies on the rendering power of the device to display windows, so there's no OpenGL or any kind of real acceleration.

It's best used for extending your desktop so you can keep your mail, or your RSS feeds, or your IM windows or your calendar visible at all times. Not so much if you need to do anything graphics-based, or anything that refreshes really fast. No games, especially.

The ViBook is a pretty decent device, but at $130, it's slightly too pricey. OWC has a version for $100, and Fastmac has a version for $80. [ViBook]

The Price: $130 for UM-710, $170 for UM-730, $200 for UM-750.

The Verdict: Decent, but not phenomenal. Regular readers should know how much I love adding monitors onto my setup, so having a 7-inch, 800x480 display for widgets or chat windows or small, always-open apps is a great idea. Well, it is, but the implementation is slightly lacking.

The Mac support, after a good amount of back-and-forth with DisplayLink, works just fine. It's plug-and-play and can be detected automatically (and rearranged) using the built-in OS X system control panel. Even the webcam is usable, which is semi-notable because of OS X's finickiness at accepting webcams. The Windows support has no notable problems either, even under Vista, provided you install the correct drivers in the correct order.

What's lacking about all versions—no matter what webcams or touchscreen features are added on—is that 800x480 is really hard to read on a 7-inch screen. It's usable, but you don't want to stare at it all day. The 7 inches are suitable for your calendar, or your email alert window, or your Twitter client; something you want to keep visible but don't check all that often.

Touchscreen feature works alright, but is finicky under Windows, and the webcam isn't quite as good as the built-in iSight on our MacBook Pro. But it is a webcam, and you can have conversations with it.

So as long as you're using this as a second, third or fourth monitor, or are tight on desk space, or don't have a spare DVI/VGA output, it's not a bad solution. We love having extra display space for things you want to have access too quickly. However, For $130~$200, you could get a regular-sized monitor and use that instead, meaning only people who fall into the above categories should consider this product. [The Gadgeteers]

You may think you have a powerful erection, but how do you know? The Erectile Quality Monitor is here to help.

Here are the instructions.

Once you obtain an erection via your stimuli of choice, simply place the head of the penis against the pressure sensor of the device and apply pressure towards the body for a count of 5 seconds or until the penis inflects (bends). At this point a reading will flash on one of the LED indicator lights, reflecting the quality of that erection. Use this same method each time you test to help ensure accurate results.

Basically, hold it up to your dong in order to see how strong it is. A stronger donger would mean that it bends less, a weak one means it bends more. If you have a problem, you'll be aware of it and take steps to treat it. Knowledge is power, my friends, and this thing is power.

Stay tuned for a hands on. [Fast Size]

The BSODomizer does have legitimate uses, like calibrating a screen, but flashing the BSOD without reason is definitely a more entertaining one. Besides, that pun would've gone to waste if it had been called the DIY Image Flasher or whatever. The BSODomizer is available from their website for $79 before shipping, and the site helpfully provides instructions for building your own.

Warning: the source link is NSFW if your workplace has a rule against ASCII drawings of Goatse. I wish I was kidding about that last part. [BSODomizer]

And since a higher contrast ratio means blacks are much blacker (though, sometimes losing out on gray detail), and whites are much brighter, this 10000 to 1 means there's a big difference between the black and white parts of your screen. makes it so that you can easily tell the difference between dark gray, gray, coal, charcoal and dust, it's perfect for picking out the right shade of carpet as well. Not that we would have charcoal carpet. What are we, animals? No price or release date yet. [T3 via Crunchgear]